


Tripping Out of the Closet

by mariadperiad20



Series: Foray into B99 [24]
Category: Brooklyn Nine-Nine (TV)
Genre: 5+1 Things, Coming Out, F/M, Kinda, bamf!team, squad is family goals, trans!Jake
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-28
Updated: 2020-05-28
Packaged: 2021-03-03 05:35:33
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,865
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24419758
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mariadperiad20/pseuds/mariadperiad20
Summary: Gina found out. Rosa knew. Boyle learned. Terry stumbled. Holt decided. Amy (sorta not really) detective-d.How each squad member realized that Jake was trans.Request fic!
Relationships: Jake Peralta/Amy Santiago
Series: Foray into B99 [24]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1320137
Comments: 39
Kudos: 497





	Tripping Out of the Closet

Gina found out Jake was trans when they were six and six and one half, respectively.

They had been painting each other’s nails, when he had admitted that he didn’t like it when she called him a girl.

She had frowned, “But you are a girl? I thought.”

“Yeah. I guess.” Jake had frowned, “But I don’t wanna be. I feel like… it’s wrong.”

“You want to be a boy? Boys are gross.” Gina had replied.

“Well, yeah. But… I feel gross. When I’m being called a girl.” He didn’t feel embarrassed per se, just… he felt weird admitting it. Like maybe he’d get into trouble.

Gina had just shrugged, “Okay. I’ll paint your nails blue, then. That’s a boy color.”

“Thanks.”

“And I can call you dude, I guess.” Gina had added, “That’s what skaters say, it’s cool right now.”

Jake had grinned, awkwardly, and Gina just went back to their conversation about the Spice Girls - although this time, not mentioning which one he would be.

It was sweet. In a Gina kind of way.

\----  
Rosa knew Jake was trans when he was refused men’s dorming at the academy.

She had met this short, gangly guy about ten minutes into orientation. Her glaring was doing a pretty good job of keeping everyone away from her - good - but then this bouncy bundle of energy popped up beside her, seemingly oblivious to the clear hostility coming off of her.

“Hi! I’m Jake Peralta,” He said, offering his hand for a shake. “Are you excited? I’m excited. What’s your name?”

“None of your business.” Rosa had replied, not taking his proffered hand.

Jake didn’t seem bothered, instead just dropping his hand and sticking it into his pocket. “Mm, long name. I’mma call you… Geraldine. No, no,” He said, “You look more like an Emily. Calling you Emily.”

“That’s not- whatever.” Rosa kept her poker face on, even as Jake continued to bounce around her like an overeager puppy.

God, he was never going to last a week. Although, actually… Rosa assessed him. Despite his seeming obliviousness, the guy seemed sharp enough. Definitely able to focus on stuff - even if that was, unfortunately, her. He did seem a bit scrawny, though - she doubted he’d make it through the drills.

Not that she would be able to either, if they were being honest. Drills sucked.

“Line up for dorming assignments!” Came a shout. Rosa noticed the shift in the man’s posture almost immediately - his smile turned tense, and his shoulders rose up slightly. His hands - which he had been waving around excitedly, now crossed in a would-be casual position, save for how his fingers seemed to be tapping out a soothing rhythm on his arms.

Rosa turned away - it wasn’t her business. She didn’t care about him, or any of the people here.

Still, she somehow ended up right in front of him for the assignments, and, as she was walking away, she heard something that would have made her pause - if she was the sort to do that sort of thing.

“I thought I was getting a roommate.”

“No, kid, you’re in a single. That, or you’re getting a female roommate. Got it?”

Rosa didn’t stick around to hear responses - it wasn’t her business. When Jake caught up to her, grin back in place - although still strained - she didn’t comment on it.

She didn’t care about Jake, the guy who wasn’t even remotely freaked out by her and her leather jacket and her scowl.

Still, she kept her eye out for him - told herself it was just because him having a single meant she could get away from her way-too-chatty roommate. Of course, that didn’t really make sense, since Jake was just as, if not more so, chatty than her.

She never commented on why he had a single - they both knew. And she didn’t care for statements of the obvious.

\-----  
Boyle learned Jake was trans when Jake didn’t tell him.

It wasn’t some big dramatic reveal or anything - although Jake had been half-expecting it, given Charles’ penchant for the dramatic.

Jake wasn’t _ashamed_ or anything - he just… was happy being a dude, and didn’t really want anyone to make a big deal about it. And, as much as he loved Charles’ showmanship, this was one thing he didn’t want there to be a show of.

He had resolved himself to not really say anything about it either way - it wasn’t lying, he wasn’t obligated to say anything about his once being biologically female because that wasn’t _him_.

But then, during their Thursday night pottery - Jake was making Nakatomi Plaza, Charles was making a himalayan cow - when Charles told him they’d have to cut this night short.

“Aw, why?” Jake asked, “I haven’t finished my Alan Rickman!”

“Well, you know how I do that charity tree gift request thing every Christmas?”

“Yeah.” Jake said, eyebrows furrowing.

“So, this girl - er, well, he’s a boy, actually, now - he was looking to get everything changed to being official, right? But obviously I can’t do that, but I didn think of something-” Charles paused, waiting for Jake to guess.

“Some obscure food thing?” Jake asked hesitantly, his plaza’s sign crumbling under his fingers.

“Close, but no.” Charles said, “I was trying to find those binders - not Amy’s kind, I mean, but they’re these things like… kinda like sports bras, and they-”

“I know what they are, Charles.”

“Oh.” He blinked. “Right, great! But, anyway, I was trying to figure out what to get but there are so many different types, so I figured I would take tonight to just go through the different sites to try and find a good brand.”

Jake was silent.

“You know, just… I want to make sure it’s right, right?”

“Here.” Jake set aside his clay, pulling out his phone. He typed something in, and Charles picked up his own phone as it buzzed. “Sent you a link. They’ve got some good binders. They’re mid-upper range but they last forever.”

“Wow, thanks Jakey!” Charles said with a grin, “This’ll be great.”

“You’ll want to get two, that way he can wash them without having to go without one - otherwise he’ll try bandaging it himself. Which is a bad idea.”

Charles had a weird look on his face - Jake had never seen something quite like it before, it was concerned but, unlike Charles’ normal type, it was restrained, some mixture of cautious and serious.

“Jake, how do you know so much about this stuff?”

Jake somehow knew what Charles was going to ask before he did - and he couldn’t help the bolt of adrenaline go through him at the words. Even though Charles’ voice was kind, he was afraid. Irrationally, unreasonably, _afraid_.

Jake didn’t mean to cry. He sort of hated himself for it, too - hated the weird feeling of shame, even though he had nothing to be ashamed about. Hated that he knew, of course he knew, Charles was fine with it, but that he couldn’t shake that weird anxiety anyway. As if he was confessing to a murder rather than a statement about himself.

Jake never actually did say he was trans - Charles just reassured him that everything was fine, and gave him a ten-minute long Boyle hug while Jake pulled himself together.

Charles, for his part, never said a word about it to anyone - not even his father, or any of the Boyles. Jake wouldn’t have even been entirely sure that Charles had figured it out at all, except that Charles had asked if he would be willing to let the kid Charles was sending the binders to have his email so they could communicate.

Jake had agreed - he thought it would do the boy some good. And Charles had grinned at him, wide and cheerful.

Sure, Charles had wished Jake had told him outright, but he knew enough to know it wasn’t his place to demand information about the other. That’s not what friends did, after all - he just hoped that Jake was okay with him knowing at all, and that he hadn’t made his friend uncomfortable.

Jake said it often, but could never say it enough, that Charles was a good man, and a great friend.

\-----  
Terry stumbled across Jake’s trans identity when he was filing personnel reports.

No big fanfare - his sleep-deprived brain barely even processed the information, at first.

Jake’s file was full of its usual stuff - great arrest rates, scathing reviews of his desk, and positive opinions from both himself and Holt - not about the desk, though, that was a lost cause. Still, Terry was blinking at the page, trying to figure out what it was that had caught his attention.

He read through it a couple times, still not sure what had made him pause, before noticing an ‘F’ where he had expected there to be an ‘M’.

It must have been a typo - Terry knew Jake, and, while granted the man was more of a man-child, he had never mentioned anything even close to being biologically female.

What’s more, if this was a typo, HR would probably have his head for it. Terry groaned, hauling himself to his feet and digging through the old employee files, pulling out a couple of previous ones for one Detective Jacob Peralta.

Terry flipped it open, scanning it boredly before zeroing in on the same marker - under gender, there was an ‘M’. Under sex assigned at birth… there was an ‘F’.

Terry was never one to hide his emotions - he believed in proudly and openly displaying emotions, like a real man would - but he wasn’t really sure what to feel.

Surprised, certainly. But not in a bad way - or a good way, either. Just… surprised. He hadn’t expected it.

Terry decided that the main emotion he felt - besides surprise - was guilt at having read it. Jake clearly didn’t intend for him to know about it, since it came so far out of left field to him. And, as open as the guy tended to be, Terry knew that he did keep a few private things very close to his chest.

This included, apparently.

Terry looked around, somehow feeling like he was doing something wrong - the invasion of privacy felt a bit like sneaking - before putting Jake’s old and new files away into their spot.

Terry resigned himself to avoid thinking about it - if Jake identified as a man, he was a man, simple as that. He knew plenty of men who barely qualified as such, and it had nothing to do with their physical or biological existences.

Terry picked up the next file - Rosa’s, of which about 98% of it was redacted. The only thing visible was her arrest record, really - and shook his head, bemused.

Jake was hardly the only one with tightly held secrets, after all.

\-----  
Holt decided Jake was trans within about one day of meeting the man.

It was simple deduction, really.

The manscaping. It had been the first tip off, although Holt knew plenty of men who did the same - no, that wasn’t it alone. It was more specifically, when jake lifted up his shirt to show off his incorrectly placed - and incorrectly knotted, good heavens - tie, Holt noticed the slight edging of scar tissue on Jake’s chest. It was barely visible, but the slight discoloration marked it out as being fibrous, rather than skin, tissue. 

There were very few things that could have caused such a specific injury - thin line, curving upwards. The first thing to rule out was, of course, workplace injury.

Upon reviewing Jake’s injury file - separate from the personnel one, after some… issues came up in the 6-7 department in regards to embarassing workplace mishaps - however, he found no such evidence of a stab or knife wound to the upper chest. Not even a paper cut.

A simple question about driving confirmed that it was not a car crash or vehicular injury. Jake was all too happy to have even the briefest conversation with him - it was painfully obvious, even as he tried to act like he was aloof - and didn’t even blink at Holt’s “robotic” questions.

“He’s going to assimilate me and send a drone to take my place.” Jakehad muttered under his breath to Amy, while Holt pretended he hadn’t positioned himself so that he could hear Jake’s conversations.

From there, Holt simply observed Jake’s activities until he found evidence.

Make no mistake - Holt did not particularly care either way, it was just a puzzle to be solved. And Jake, for all of his shenanigans, was able to be quite crafty when he intended to be. And Holt took it as a bit of a challenge - and he was nothing if not competitive. Well, that wasn’t entirely accurate - he was also a police captain, a husband, a dog father, an aficionado of the flute. However, one of his qualities in life was competitiveness.

Holt had his confirmation when he was snooping around for the second Halloween Heist set up. He had been peering through Jake’s desk - checking for places to plant a bug that he wouldn’t find - when he found an FUD.

Considering Jake was neither a hiker nor a woman, there was only one, rahter obvious conclusion.

Jake did not have a penis.

Holt did not like to think about any of his coworkers’ genitalia, for any reason.

He had, he supposed, brought this mental imagery upon himself, after all.

Holt resolved not to mention it. He understood the value of staying in the closet - the privacy and comfort it offered, to not have to constantly justify to the world and explain every inappropriate and random question people came up with. Holt also understood the value of being out of the closet, but discreet - being as high-profile as he was, discretion wasn’t ever really an option for him. Holt was always very open about his sexuality, made no secret of saying his husband’s name and their now-legal marital status aloud. He did wonder, on occasion, the benefits of being able to slide into the world of heterosexuals without so much as a wayward blink.

Holt had simply moved on, question answered. Curiosity sated.

He did make a mental note to avoid looking in Jake’s third drawer ever again. Or, really any drawer - the entire desk was a mess. Holt was definitely putting a scathing review of it in the personnel report he was supposed to give Terry.

\-----  
Amy concluded that Jake was trans after copious detective work.

That was a lie. She found out about halfway to nakedsville.

“Amy, wait-” Jake choked, his hands catching hers - which were currently halfway to undoing his pants.

Amy pulled back like she’d been burned. “We don’t have to- if you don’t want- Shit, this was a bad idea-”

“No, no, I do. I do, it’s just-” Jake hesitated.

“Jake, is everything alright?” Amy asked, hands moving to his shoulders, one sliding up to his face. He leaned against her touch.

“I’m not- I don’t have- um,” Jake laughed breathily, sitting down on the bed. “I’m trans.”

“Oh.”

“So I don’t have, um, well. You know.”

“You didn’t get the bottom surgery?” She asked awkwardly - detective coming in full force, even as she tried to rein it back in.

“No, it… I’m a dude without it, you know? And I looked a tit a couple of times, but it just doesn’t… I mean,” Jake stumbled with his words, trying to find a way to explain that just being a dude was enough, that the dysphoria all but vanished with top surgery, that he didn’t mind having a vagina because he was a man with it, whatever, but he was staring at Amy and he was stuttering all over the place.

He was somehow less afraid now than he was with Charles. Maybe because with Charles it was him as a person, and with Amy it was just the junk not-in his trunk. Heh.

Amy took a moment, then shrugged. “I mean, I have a strap-on.”

“Wait, seriously? Miss Santiago, you astound me-”

Amy shoved him gently, “Keep that up and there’ll be no shower sex after.”

“Shutting up.” Jake said, before pulling Amy down onto the bed with him, relishing in the little giggle that was forced out of her lungs at the gentle impact, before beginning to mark a trail of kisses down her chest.

\-----  
Hitchcock and Scully never realized Jake was trans.

They didn’t quite understand why that pastel looking flag was on Jake’s desk, or why the same colors were on his face, with his wife Amy grinning next to him. They did know it was Pride - bears made the best barbeque, after all - but whatever that flag was, they just didn’t get it. 

Of course, Scully pointed out, it didn’t really matter, since the flag didn’t affect their workload, and therefore was irrelevant.

Hitchcock had agreed, before commenting that the flag looked like a cake.

Now they were eating cake that was the same colors as the flag at the parade, and returning a thumbs-up from a dude absolutely covered in glitter.

Such is life.

Good for Jake.

Better for Hitchcock and Scully, however - since they got the cake.

**Author's Note:**

>  _Total Requests:_ "I hope I don’t sound Pushy or come off as rude but do you think you can do a trans jake as a request? Or omg ignore this totally if ur not taking requests I don’t want to make you feel stressed" and "hi!! could you do a b99 fic where jake is trans, but the whole squad doesn’t know, and somehow they find out without him telling them and completely support him? thank you :)" and "ur amazing and trans jake coming out?/so i sent an ask a few minutes ago for a trans!jake fic and to clarify on that, could no one know that he is trans and then they find out somehow and completely support him? thank you so much :)" _and_ "hi :) i had this really weird dream last night about brooklyn 99 where jake was trans(man) so i was wondering if you could write a fic about that:)"
> 
> thank you for your requests! i love the overlap, it's kinda lit :D


End file.
